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it’ll take a while sifting through the hard drives covering the main thoroughfares, unless he went into a shop, somewhere we’d get a close-up.’
    ‘So all this technology we have in the Square Mile is useless,’ Bryant harrumphed.
    ‘Not at all. It’s just time-consuming. We have another clue as to his ID. In the bottom of the sleeping bag was a plastic wallet. It melted but there were a couple of cards inside, and once we separate them out we might get the remains of a chip from one.’
    ‘If he was sleeping rough, they won’t have been credit cards. Are they here?’
    ‘Hang on.’ Kershaw carefully shook out a plastic envelope, and a gnarled, blackened lump dropped into his desk tray. Bryant untangled a pair of reading glasses and squinted at it.
    ‘That’s a staff card for the Bloomsbury Sustainable Market,’ he said without a second’s hesitation. ‘It’s a collective where students stack shelves in return for groceries.’
    ‘I don’t see how you can possibly know that,’ said Banbury. ‘We’d need to get some chromatography on it before—’
    ‘When I was a child,’ Bryant interrupted, ‘I was very good at jigsaws. That little mark in the corner …’ He tapped the blob. ‘… that’s the bottom part of a picture. It’s the handle of a kitchen whisk – the market’s symbol. I’d recognize it anywhere.’
    ‘OK.’ Banbury shrugged. ‘We’ll get on it.’
    ‘What do you think happened?’ Kershaw asked.
    ‘Scylla and Charybdis,’ said Bryant. ‘He got caught napping between them. The riot police arriving on one side, the protestors kettled on the other.’
    ‘It’s hard to believe he didn’t wake up with all the noise in the next street,’ said Kershaw.
    ‘Have you ever spent a day on the streets?’ asked Bryant. ‘You’re on the move all the time. It’s incredibly tiring. By the time it gets dark all you want to do is drop down in your tracks and sleep. I doubt this poor devil would have been woken by a bomb going off.’
    ‘Right,’ said Kershaw. ‘I’ll make some calls back at the PCU and we’ll get this wrapped up.’
    But Bryant showed no signs of budging from the remains of the body. ‘It’s worse than it ever was,’ he muttered. ‘Bankers with million-pound bonuses stepping around kids who aren’t even guaranteed a place to lay their heads. The poor are worse off now than they were in Victorian times. What’s happened to my city?’ For a moment he looked as if he was standing at the edge of an unimaginable abyss.
    ‘Come on,’ said Banbury gently, taking his boss’s arm. ‘I’ll walk back with you.’

8

MASKS
     
    John May sat back in his chair and thought about the office he had shared for so long with his partner.
    It wasn’t the same room, of course – that had changed many times since Bryant had accidentally burned down the unit years before – but somehow it always reinvented itself with the same layout, the same esoteric books, the same haphazardly accumulated bric-a-brac. Looking at the empty green leather chair opposite, May suddenly had a change of heart. Bryant had flung caution aside and followed his instincts, heading off to visit St Pancras simply because he could not allow his natural curiosity to be quelled. So, May wondered, why was
he
sitting here content to follow orders? What did that ever gain him?
    Grabbing his coat, he left the building and hailed a taxi to Crutched Friars. The least he could do was take a look at the façade of the Findersbury Bank. He did not expect to find anything of value there, but it usually helped to understand the exact geographical layout of the incident scene.
    As he walked over the wet tarmac towards the bank’s blackened foyer, he saw a pair of firefighters bent over by the entrance examining something in the soot-stains. One stood up at his approach and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Hey, John, they’ve got you on this too, eh?’
    ‘Just an ID job,’ said May. ‘What have you got